i am accomplishing things. like building a christmas tree with john, and keeping the house clean, cooking an actual dinner every night..just general shit that i haven't been able to do consistently since my great grandfather started dying. everything has been so fucking difficult since then.

we weren't even close. he was a terrifying prescence when i was a child; a moderately emotionally abusive one when i was an adult. he once called me “disgusting” because my shirt moved away from my skirt when i was leaning over for something.

at the end he was senile, scared, and totally miserable. we didn't get any quality time; no sudden deathbed confessions of why he was such a huge bastard to all the people who were obligated to love him.

except there were these truly telling moments. like when he was in and out of morphine nightmares, crying and begging his brother, phillip, to leave him alone. phillip had been dead for roughly 60 years at that point, but i knew the stories. phillip was his older brother who tormented him while raising him (when you give birth to sixteen kids, i guess you end up delegating responsibility whenever you can). phillip would do things like tie him to a tree along the river, then toss him into the currant. thats dramatic enough to be a “family story”...i'm guessing the constant barrage of less creative physical abuse wasn't memorable enough to make it into the re-telling.

there were moments when he would be confused, and call me my grandmother's name, or my great aunt’s name, and i wouldn't correct him because i wanted him to feel safe.

i hoped that once he was dead, the suffering would be over, not only for him, but for us, for me. that his death would let us let go of all the things he had said and done.

instead it opened up this gaping hole in my dimension.

instead of being able to forget and move on from the past, i'm able to see down the rabbit hole. i'm able to see my great grandfather being hit, being abused, not understanding how much an older child can resent the responsibility of a younger sibling. i see him growing up, believing that the cruelty had strengthened him and made him into the exceptional man he became. somewhere things got twisted for him, and he started to believe that the positive character traits wouldn't have existed without the abuse. i see him dominating my great grandmother, and being delighted that her personality and beliefs allowed for this. i see him bullying his daughter, the child who would become my grandmother; i see his frustration with how smart she is, how she would have been the mechanic to take over his garage (his legacy) if only she had been born with the right set of genitals. i see him entirely unable to control his temper, because he was taught that grown men didn't need to spare children.

he once hit my grandmother with a tire iron, because she didn't hand him something quickly enough.

i see him instilling these concepts in my grandmother, informing her in no uncertain terms that ability to deal with and repress pain (both physical and mental) is the absolute most important thing a person can master.

i see my grandmother, young yet already defeated, seeking validation from any man who could appreciate her skills and talents without criticizing everything about her. she intentionally got pregnant at sixteen to escape the household. instead of finishing high school, and pursuing art school, she chose to forfeit all of her personal dreams simply to get away from her father.

i remember being sixteen, myself, quite vividly. i can see my grandmother, a short tempered perfectionist as a grown adult, being a tempestuous teenager with not one, but two babies hanging off of her by the time she was eighteen. i can see her making bad, brash, thoughtless, and sometimes abusive choices. i can see her losing her temper again and again, unable to raise a child any other way, because at this point, she believes that her positive attributes were created by the abuse from her father, instead of seeing how much he had crippled her confidence and effected her logical thought process.

i see my mother grow up hating her mother, and her grandfather. seeing them as the same kind of monster.

i see my mother now, and i have a theory based strictly on informed opinion: i think my mother has depression, and possibly a personality disorder.

she was raised in our family, where people don't have things like that. you “pull yourself up by the boot straps.” you repress and overcome at any expense. depression is a symptom of having “too much time on your hands.”

i see my mother during my childhood. she was secretive, frequently unhappy, with these beautiful shining moments where she taught us something that was dear to her. i honestly think now that the rest of her energy was spent trying to keep herself calm and happy enough not to abuse us. not to perpetuate the cycle. she decided that being emotionally negligent and distant was a much better option than being intense, angry, and involved.

One evening in the fall of 2001, our house burned. It was a two century old post and beam farm house, so it stayed standing, but it was mostly gutted and had to be torn down and a new house, a modular, put up.

A few years later, while I was still in high school, my mother was baling off mulch hay off to clear fields, and the thrower on the baler she was using caught hay on fire that went into the wagon. She unhooked the burning load and pulled the baler out of the field, but most of the field burned, as did the wagon, its contents, and most of the belts and bearings on the bale thrower.

Between late winter and early spring of this year, our outdoor wood stove’s electronic control unit caught fire, burned out almost all of the wiring and components in the unit and set light to an adjacent woodshed, burning up most of my logging and wood cutting tools, including both of my chainsaws. My big saw was less than a year old, and the little saw was one that had been bought to replace my mother’s saw which burned in our house fire.

About two weeks later, I was stripping a van out the back door of the shop at the salvage yard I work at and the other worker kicked the door open and yelled fire. I ran inside, grabbing fire extinguishers on the way and we emptied at least a dozen before being pushed out by the smoke from burning tires and fuel tanks. We spent the next two or three hours moving truck beds and doors and tailgates and vehicles, running into the smoke. Looking back, I can’t believe I wasn’t burned. I coughed up my lungs for a week or two.

Yesterday morning, at around 3am, Amanda and I woke up to my mother yelling for me that the neighbor’s barn was on fire. I ran downstairs, threw on a few layers and boots, and could see the red glow in the sky as soon as I opened my front door. I ran to the garage to grab one extinguisher while Amanda grabbed the one in my truck in case we could use them to rescue animals, as fighting the fire wasn’t possible. All but one dog made it out, and the goats were safe. The heat was turning the snow on a camper parked down wind into steam, so I ran to get one of our bigger tractors and chains, figuring I could hook onto the rear bumper to drag it backwards away from the danger zone, since the hitch and its propane tanks were too close to the fire to get to, but it caught before I got back. Slick roads and a plow truck sliding down the hill from town slowed the fire departments down in getting here, so we spent three hours watching things burn for the most part. At six or so, I had to get the tractor again to pull out a fire engine that they’d gotten stuck in the lawn.

I can’t say that I’m necessarily traumatized by any of it, but I probably have more nightmares about fire than the average fellow. I’m a big cause and effect kind of guy, and I don’t think anything particularly mystical is going on, but sometimes I feel like I’m followed by fire, that the next blaze is right around the corner.

Today was better. I’m still somewhat of an anxious mess, but I gained some focus and clarity. I sat down and made a list of everything I need to get done. It’s a little scary because there is SO MUCH, but it helps to see it on paper instead of just having it floating around abstractly in my head. Tonight I started to make a study guide for my clinical and counseling psych final, and realized there’s all this material about stress. Like three pages of notes about stress as it relates to the subset of health psychology. I couldn’t help but laugh. It calmed me down a little. There’s this happy medium of stress called eustress in which you have enough stress to motivate you to do well, but not so much so that you are overwhelmed or “distressed”. It’s a bell curve on a graph. The midpoint is eustress and the bar situated nicely within the curve is called the “Area of Best Performance”. This is where I need to be. Some stress is okay- more than okay, it can be a positive, motivating factor. I just need to keep myself in the Area of Best Performance without falling into the Pit of Despair/Distress. I can do this.

Why CAN’T I be that girl that’s OK with this relationship being a “friends with benefits” type of thing for right now.

Why can’t we just talk and text, snapchat, workout together, hang out, occasionally hook up in his bed, and just… you know, take it easy and slow. When it’s convenient, it works… when it’s not, we just lay back for a while. Why??

Because that’s, apparently, the only way this is going to work for him.

And I , apparently, can’t work like that.

I want this to grow, he wants this to just…. not.

I get why he doesn’t have it in him right now.

So, I’m not pushing him into anything. So, I said we should probably just end this.

And so I went over this morning and I said goodbye and we just laid together and he held me and I didn’t want to go. And we made out but we didn’t have sex. And we just… that. That’s it. Because. I. Can’t. Do. This. Any. More.

And… he can’t give any more either. So, I felt the only thing we could do was part ways.

But then he texted me.

And we’ve been texting all day about how stupid and shitty this is.

And it is.

But, now he’s like “it’s your call… you just tell me what to do… I’m ok with it being like this”.

BUT I ALREADY TOLD HIM I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE!!!!!!!…

And I know he doesn’t want to say goodbye.

Because I saw him wiping his tears away through the window this morning after I left. I saw him lean over his kitchen sink in pain. I know it sucks for him, too. Or he wouldn’t have done that. He wouldn’t be texting me.

What does he want?!?!!?1

I know what he wants. THat was rhetorical.

BUT I can’t DO IT. I can’t. I have been for three months since Megan died. And I thought I could keep going on like this until he was ready. But, truth is…. I can’t. I can’t keep going with this and giving it my all, and doing everything for him he needs and everything that I want. Because I just can’t.